


river of stars

by dorypop



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam has just moved to the Barns so this is set the summer before he leaves for college, Established Relationship, M/M, Opal gets to explore her artistic tendencies, POV Ronan Lynch, Ronan Lynch Loves Adam Parrish, Stargazing, and Ronan and Adam have a cute date!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:02:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25935622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorypop/pseuds/dorypop
Summary: Adam takes Ronan stargazing
Relationships: Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 8
Kudos: 66





	river of stars

A crash came from the laundry room, followed by some curses. Not that Adam _never_ cursed—he did, and Ronan liked it because it meant Adam was comfortable enough around him to let him hear what he believed were the not-polished parts of himself—but seeing as Ronan _wasn’t_ currently putting his mouth to work on Adam’s body, it probably meant something was wrong.

So Ronan ran downstairs, almost tripping at the last step when Chainsaw came flapping from the dining room and screeched right by his left ear.

“You okay?” he asked, trying to hide how out of breath he was by leaning casually on the doorframe of the laundry room, because if Adam was swooned by something it was usually by overt demonstrations of dignity.

Adam was kneeling on the floor, picking chunks of broken glass. An assessing glance told Ronan they probably came from the flower vase that was suspiciously absent from its usual living address, on the shelf by the drying machine.

“Uh? Yeah, sorry. Just wanted somewhere to put these,” he said, pointing at the assortment of wildflowers that Opal had brought into the house in the morning, as a welcoming gift for Adam. That surely explained the vase, but not the cursing.

“What happened?” Ronan asked.

“I dropped it,” Adam drily answered.

Chainsaw screeched again, this time from the kitchen.

“Yeah, I gathered that. What made you drop it?”

“Clumsiness,” Adam said, and shrugged, but his shoulders were rigid when he threw the broken pieces into the trash can, and he had yet to look Ronan in the eye, making Ronan’s efforts to appear cool in front of his boyfriend go to waste.

“Adam,” he said. Adam sighed, and stood up in a fluid motion.

“It’s good news, really,” Adam said. “I’ll be home tonight.”

Ronan arched one eyebrow when he handed Adam the mop to pick the smaller pieces.

“Weren’t you working with that Bianca-I-love-hearing-my-fucking-voice?”

“ _No_ ,” Adam snapped. And then he turned around and kept sweeping the floor while he explained, as if he’d already told this particular piece of information to Ronan a thousand times before. Which maybe he had, but, like, only once, probably. Twice, tops. It was hard to keep track of Adam’s odd jobs, especially since Ronan tried _very hard_ not to think about all the hours he could be spending with Adam before he left for college, but had to stay put at home instead, waiting for him to finish working. “I was going to be working at the stargazing thing while she did the stargazing. And you _could_ be nice to her, you know, seeing as she got me the job.”

Yeah, he’d only met this Bianca once, didn’t like her. Adam shouldn’t bet on them becoming besties.

“So now you’ve decided stargazing is below you or what?”

Adam huffed, applying maybe a little too much force into his sweeping. “They changed the location. Can’t go,” he said, like it was nothing, but there was a flower vase that could argue the opposite.

Adam’s shitty car had died on him two nights ago, in the middle of his moving to the Barns. Adam had yet to buy the pieces needed to resurrect it again. Why he’d want to do that was beyond Ronan’s understanding, but he was learning to pick his battles.

“Don’t be stupid. Take the BMW,” he offered.

But Adam shook his head.

“That’s fine. They’ve moved it two hours away from here, and I’d have to wait for at least another hour after the thing is done until they pick their stuff up. That means I’d be getting here at, like, four in the morning. And I have a shift at half-past four at the factory—it’s just not worth it.”

Ronan agreed. But he also knew Adam was trying to save up for college, because studying at Harvard was apparently very time consuming even for brilliant nerds like him.

“I’ll drive you then,” he said.

Adam snorted.

“And do _what_ while I work—join the stargazing?”

“Well, I _could_.”

“The other day you said they were all asswipes for meeting other people to stargaze.”

Ronan crossed his arms.

“Well, they _are_. Do they need help to look up, or what? The stars are just _there_.”

Adam finished sweeping and he put away the mop.

“Bianca said it’s also an interpretation thing? Like, they tell you how to find the constellations and what they meant for the Romans and all of that.”

“So. Asswipes. They could just read fucking Ovid. But whatever. I’ll drive you.”

Adam looked at Opal’s flowers.

“I broke your vase,” he said.

Ronan took the steps needed to bring him as close to Adam as possible. Adam let himself be hugged.

“Don’t give a shit about the vase,” Ronan whispered by his good ear.

So they found a drawn-out cookie jar that served the purpose of a flower vase, and Opal was ecstatic when she found her present for Adam presiding the kitchen table. And after lunch Adam took a nap, and when he woke up to a shower of kisses to his freckled nose he decided he’d make some sandwiches to take with them in case they didn’t have time to have a proper dinner on the way to the stargazing thing location.

The event in itself was as shitty as Ronan had imagined it to be. They charged a really stupid amount of money to enter the thing, which was held in the middle of the woods in Buttfuck, Virginia, with the only upside that they put Adam in charge of bringing people from the entrance booth to the scattered clutter of mats, so Ronan got to see Adam’s profile lit by the yellow lantern he carried so that they didn’t trip to their deaths on a raised root or something.

That was unfortunately the only moment he got to see Adam, who when everyone was already settled was tasked to stay in charge of manning both the drink booth and the bathrooms, because these fucking assholes couldn’t take the stick out of their asses to take a piss _in the woods._ But. Whatever. The actual thing consisted of a lady pointing to Ursa Minor and Pegasus and telling the story of Hercules and the lion, but Ronan tuned her off and just passed the time looking at the twinkling stars. It could have been peaceful, if only the couple on the mat next to his could stop making out for just _two_ _seconds_.

Ronan opted out of looking at Saturn through the fancy telescope, in hopes it’d shorten the line and they’d be able to go home sooner. He also refrained from acknowledging Bianca when she came to say hello to him, one arm in her boyfriend’s back pocket and the other holding a massive cola cup with two straws dangling from it.

“Hi! You’re Ronan, right? He’s Adam’s boyfriend. This is _my_ boyfriend,” she said, and giggled, and Ronan kept quiet because Adam wouldn’t like it much if he picked a fight with her while he was still working.

“So,” the boyfriend said, because they were apparently too dumb to pick on the hostile atmosphere. Or they couldn’t see Ronan’s scowl, as the fairy lights hung near the bathrooms to signal for them were quite far. “That was fun, right? Who’d have thought Jupiter got so much game, right?”

Ronan glared through him.

“Right,” he deadpanned. Bianca giggled again.

“It was _so_ worth it, coming here and all.”

Ronan looked up and prayed they understood. They, of course, didn’t.

“Oh, right. I forgot. Where’s Jupiter again?”

“Next to Uranus, wasn’t it?” Bianca lifted her finger and pointed at a random piece of sky, too to the right to be even closer to the planets.

“Saturn, actually,” Ronan said.

“Right, right!” The boyfriend laughed. Ronan decided it was time to take a trip to the bathroom.

He didn’t say goodbye to Bianca.

Adam was wiping the counter when he approached him.

“Having fun?” he asked, and Ronan couldn’t really see that much of his face in the surrounding darkness, but he could hear the exhaustion in his voice.

“Lots,” Ronan said. “I’ll go wait in the car.”

Very slowly, the parking lot emptied. Ronan had closed his eyes and was just letting himself drift to the beats of his music—not enough to sleep, but to let time go—when the passenger door opened.

Adam sighed as he dropped on the seat.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” Ronan started the car.

“Sorry for that.” Adam burrowed into his jacket before fastening his seatbelt.

Ronan didn’t have time to think about a clever comeback to ease Adam’s worries about having forced Ronan into spending the worst night of his life, or whatever the shit he was thinking with that beautiful head he had, because by the time he’d figured which lane he had to take to get them back to the Barns, Adam’s head had lolled a bit to the side and his breathing had eased.

Ronan turned the volume of his EDM down and drove them home. And then he made coffee while Adam showered and shoved the keys to the BMW into his chest before heading off to sleep.

He dreamt of the stars.

It was noon when the engine approaching the house awoke him. He only had time to blink twice and thrust what he’d brought back from the dream into the closet before Adam’s keys opened the door.

“What’s that,” he mumbled when he entered the kitchen, before Opal plummeted onto him to take into the room, as if he wasn’t able to find the way himself.

“I brought lunch,” Adam said, with a smile, pointing at the takeout boxes littering the kitchen table.

“Kerah!” Opal cried, tugging at his arm until he paid attention to her. He almost instantly regretted not ignoring her further, when he discovered a very suspiciously looking pile of a brown substance on top of the kitchen counter, _dripping_ onto the floor.

“Tell me,” he said, very slowly, “that that’s not your shit.”

Opal shrieked, as if she was offended.

“It’s a sculpture!” she yelled. “Adam, tell him!”

Adam studied the thing with a very serious frown.

“Is it your shit or not.” Ronan wasn’t really in the mood to tell her off before kissing Adam, so he just did that, in preparation to whatever came their way.

“Well,” Adam said, when Opal failed to provide certifications that guaranteed the source of her sculpting material. “What’s it supposed to be? A pyramid?”

Opal scoffed.

“It’s _abstract_ ,” she enunciated, as if she hadn’t learnt that word two days earlier, when watching a documentary at Fox Way with Blue.

“Sure,” Adam nodded. “You hungry?”

She was, but she might be having an eating-outside day, because she took a fork and one of the takeout containers and ran to the fields through the back door.

“It’s probably mud,” Adam said.

“Why are you so chill about this.”

“Sleep deprivation. Probably.” Adam shrugged and took two plates from the cabinet. It warmed Ronan’s heart that Adam knew where shit was in the Barns’ kitchen. “She took the fries, but we can still have the rest?”

“Okay. But you’re going to sleep right after.”

“Oh? And why’s that?”

“Because,” Ronan said, starting the tap to wash his hands, “we’re having a date tonight.”

“Are we?”

“Yes. No refunds.”

Adam laughed, and it was yet another sign of how tired he was, because it always took a bit more of effort on Ronan’s part to make him laugh.

“Okay. Better get my beauty sleep, then.”

Ronan nodded, and that settled it. So he sent Adam upstairs as soon as they’d finished the watermelon they had for dessert, and then went to collect Opal outside because just fries was no healthy way of acquiring necessary nutrients and, really, did she want to remain a runt for the rest of her life?

She agreed to eat some fruit, but not to clean up her sculpture, and then she wailed loudly when Ronan threw it directly into the trash.

“Opal!” he whispered. “Adam’s sleeping!”

Opal lowered her voice, but not her rage. She stole Ronan’s phone to call Blue and tell her all about how nobody understood art in that house. Which was fine by Ronan, and freed his afternoon to go tend to farm shit, while he waited for night to come.

He woke Adam up after he’d showered.

“Hello,” Adam said into Ronan’s pillow.

“Get ready. We leave in fifteen minutes. Bring a jacket,” Ronan instructed, and took advantage of Adam’s sleepiness to take what he’d dreamed earlier from where he’d hid it.

When Adam came outside, with tousled hair but smiling eyes, Ronan stopped biting his armbands.

“Should I have worn something fancier?” he asked, as he came to Ronan to kiss him hello. “Didn’t know if you meant a jacket like for the cold or, like, from a suit.”

“Smartass,” Ronan murmured before going for another kiss. “You look good.”

“I do?”

In Ronan’s opinion, Adam looked good in everything he wore, and even better when he took his clothes off, but he didn’t say that because they had places to be and the sun was already down in the horizon.

“Let’s go,” he said, kissing Adam one last time.

Adam tilted his head in a silent question, but he followed Ronan to the car.

“So? Where are we going?”

But Ronan only hummed and turned his music up.

Adam snorted, but let it go. He started chatting about this coworker he had at the factory, who was about to have a baby.

They’d only driven for around ten minutes when Ronan parked on the side of the road and turned the lights off.

“We’re here,” he said.

“Uh?” Adam looked outside the windshield, but he of course couldn’t see anything, because they were in the middle of the countryside and there were no other cars around. “And what’s it that we’re doing here, exactly?”

Ronan took the key out of the contact.

“Stargazing.”

He didn’t wait for Adam’s answer before he exited the car and took his dream thing and a blanket from the trunk. When he closed it, the only source of light was the moon.

“What’s that?” Adam asked, as Ronan extended the blanket just a few steps ahead of the car.

“It’s like a planisphere. But cooler,” he smirked, although he wasn’t sure Adam could see that.

Ronan sat down on the blanket and pressed the buttons on his dream thing. It immediately lit up, projecting a small copy of the sky above them. The moment his finger touched one of the stars, the constellation it belonged to glowed brighter.

“That’s Cygnus,” Ronan said. A side glance told him Adam was busy looking for the real one up above. He didn’t take long to find it.

“The swan?”

“After Orpheus was killed, he was transformed into a swan and placed among the stars next to his lyre.” Ronan’s finger moved to point at the constellation next to Cygnus. “This is Lyra. Its brightest star is named Vega.”

“And that’s the Milky Way?”

When Ronan looked at him, he could almost read the stars on Adam’s bright eyes. He swallowed, and nodded.

Adam wiggled down on the blanket until he was laying down on it.

“Come here?” he asked, so of course Ronan came. Adam rested his head on Ronan’s chest while Ronan recounted everything he could remember from old summer nights when his dad was not home and his mom would organize camping trips just outside the house.

“They’re beautiful,” Adam whispered, a while after Ronan had run out of stories to tell. Ronan didn’t say he thought Adam himself was more beautiful. “I’d never stopped to just watch the stars, you know?”

Ronan hummed, and kept quietly carding his fingers through Adam’s hair.

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from this haiku by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: In the River of Stars (Japanese name for the Milky Way) / the white water’s noise can be heard / when night comes.
> 
> The idea for this little thing actually came to me because two nights ago I had to work at a stargazing event that was probably very cool but I didn't get to participate a lot in it because I was busy watching the door. The moment I got home, very late and a bit colder than expected, I just knew I needed to turn it into a pynch fic.
> 
> If you liked it, please leave a comment or a kudo, or come talk to me [on tumblr](https://hklnvgl.tumblr.com/)! 💛


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